Categories: "Devices"

When you right-click (or control-click) on a file in the Mac OS X Finder, you get a contextual menu with a nice “Open With” option, which lets you open the selected file with any Application that you desire to.

That is pretty nice until that menu gets all clogged up with all sorts of old/broken apps that you don’t use any more.

Due to some caching mechanism, it seems that this menu never cleans itself up :/

Just download the file below, unzip it and put the “Resize Pictures FP” icon on your desktop, your Applications folder, your Dock or wherever is convenient for you.

Then, whenever you want to resize pictures, just select them and drag & drop them onto that icon. The script will ask you for a pixel size to resize to (the default is 1024 pixels) and it will save the resized files on your desktop.

I recently ordered an SSD drive from OWC and proceeded to replace the stock drive on my good old MacBook Pro (one of the first unibody series).

The process was actually easier than I originally thought: just connect the new drive using an universal drive adapter and clone the internal drive using SuperDuper!. Then open the back cover and swap out the drives. Done! (Btw: OWC are doing a great job with their instruction videos that show you that, yes, you can actually do it yourself in no time! ;))

Reboot: the mac feels like it’s at least 3 or 4 times faster. Especially from Login to Desktop where it’s possible to start working instantaneously, compared to the painful wait in front of a half frozen screen I had before.

It’s like a new mac for a fraction of the price of an actual new one! And I now actually like using that laptop again ;)

Apparently, the Nvidia chipset has been replaced with an Intel chipset that is now capable of 6 Gigabit/second link speeds… and the entry level drive is now capable of 3 Gbps link speeds…

That is definitely not an improvement over last year’s model.

However, why still not a 6 Gbps drive? Because the drives are not fast enough to saturate a 3 Gbps link? My bet is that 6 Gbps would definitely make sense with SSD.

The Apple Store had no 7200 rpm or SSD Mac Mini on display. So, I enquired by the Apple Store employees… who had to ask their tech guru… who said that the 7200 rm drives are 3 Gbps also and that the SSD drives are 3 Gbps also. Since the iMac with a 7200 rpm drive is at 3 Gbps and that the Mac Mini with SSD is also at 3 Gbps, I will take their word for it: Apple just won’t give you drives that can communicate any faster than 3 Gbps! :/ (and they won’t sell them to you either…)

So… if you’d actually want top performance, you’d have to go for aftermarket solutions…